Soft Magnetic Components: Powder Cores & More

Magnetic cores are produced from materials featuring high magnetic permeability and are used in a wide variety of electrical, electromechanical, and magnetic equipment. Magnetics produces a multitude of soft magnetic components, each lending themselves to specific applications based on their unique properties. These components can be categorized as follows:

Powder Cores

Powder cores are created using the powder of multiple alloys with distributed air gaps to help condense their magnetic fields and minimize core loss. These cores are widely utilized for their high electrical resistivity, low hysteresis and eddy current losses, low permeability changes in high temperatures, and significant inductance stability in both AC and DC environments. For this reason, they are commonly used for high current/low ripple applications, including (but not limited to) flyback transformers, resonant circuits, battery chargers, loading and choke coils, as well as boost and output inductors. Visit the Powder Cores page to learn more about this type of core.

Ferrite Cores

Ferrite cores are dense, ceramic shapes that are crafted from a mix of iron oxide and other metal oxides or carbonates, such as magnesium, zinc, or manganese. Magnetics ferrite cores are made from manganese zinc (MnZn). The benefits of employing ferrite cores include high magnetic permeability and low electrical conductivity, helping to prevent eddy currents. Because of these properties, ferrite cores are commonly used for high-frequency power transformers, power inductors, radio frequency transformers, EMC filters, current sensors, and more. 

As is with powder cores, Magnetics’ ferrite cores are available in numerous industry-standard shapes and sizes and are offered alongside some hardware and accessories. Ferrite cores can be machined to custom specifications in order to meet individualized operational requirements. Visit the Ferrite Cores page to learn more about this type of core.

Strip Wound Cores

Magnetic strip wound cores, or tape wound cores, are crafted from thin strips of high permeability nickel-iron alloys that are wound into toroids for varying frequency applications, including current transformers, pulse transformers, output transformers, magnetic amplifiers, and more. Among Magnetics’ strip wound products are also high permeability nanocrystalline cores and amorphous cut cores, both made from metallic glass materials. While nanocrystalline cores are annealed to create a uniform microstructure, amorphous cut cores have an amorphous atomic structure, resulting in higher resistivity than nanocrystalline.  Visit the Tape Wound Cores page to learn more about Magnetics’ strip wound cores, amorphous cut cores, and nanocrystalline cores.